Newt Gingrich’s shutdown nostalgia tour

The shutdown drama is an ideal occasion for Gingrich’s return to the airwaves. | AP Photo

Self-assured statements like that – coming from a man who once confidently told his new CNN colleague, Jake Tapper: “I’m going to be the nominee” for president in 2012 – draw a combination of smiles and eye-rolls from Gingrich’s former colleagues.

To those who think the problem with the Gingrich-era House was that it became the Newt Gingrich Variety Show – well, seeing the 70-year-old Georgia native fulminate on cable TV does little to change that impression.

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New York Rep. Peter King, a vocal critic of the ’95-‘96 shutdowns as well as the current standoff, said Republicans might well have triumphed more clearly back then “if Newt had handled himself better.”

“I did know several people in the White House who said a number of times they were close to making more concessions than they did,” King said. “It became very personal around Newt – you know, the complaining about Air Force One and just putting himself out front.”

Former Pennsylvania Rep. Bob Walker, a close friend of Gingrich, strongly disagreed. On the contrary, he argued, Republicans today would be better positioned in the shutdown if their legislative goals were as clear – and as related to the issue of spending – as Gingrich’s budget-balancing aims were 18 years ago.

“I don’t buy and I don’t think Newt buys the idea that Republicans suffered enormously from the last shutdown. We got what we set out to get,” Walker said. “It would be natural for people to come to [Gingrich] in this current situation, because he did lead us through the last large one.”

Veterans of the last shutdown, including Gingrich, tick off a variety of differences between this stalemate and the last one: the GOP’s demands are far different, the president this time is less willing than Clinton was to negotiate, the nature of the news media that surrounds the shutdown is vastly more complex and fast-moving.

When it comes to Gingrich himself, though, his longtime friends and observers say the greatest differences are in the tone and attitude of the man Time magazine once credited with having “perfected the politics of anger.”

This time around, sitting on a cable TV set as opposed to standing on the floor of the House, Gingrich is notably lighter in his mood and even cheerful in his tartly-worded arguments against Obama and the Democrats.

Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, a longtime Gingrich ally, said the former speaker’s grand shutdown revival tour reflected his natural ebullience and “joy on the job.” It’s the difference, former CNN bureau chief Frank Sesno said, between being a football player on the field and being “up in the booth, doing color commentary.”

“Many people have said Newt sounds remarkably reasonable in his ‘Crossfire’ voice,” said Sesno, who covered the 1990s shutdowns and recalled: “One of the realities for him, too, is that he left with a lot of questions and a lot of criticism about his management style. And it turned out that the shutdown was for him what health care was for Clinton: a political disaster.”

Gingrich is not immune to self-reassessment about the 1990s clashes with Clinton, though he is more self-critical about the effort to impeach Clinton several years later than he is about the shutdowns. “Frankly, the whole Lewinsky process was a tragedy,” he said. “We were on the edge of a grand bargain on both Medicare and Social Security.”

And for his part, Gingrich echoed Sesno’s football metaphor, musing that in his new role he probably feels “a little bit about how John Madden must have felt.”

“He was one of the great young coaches in the history of the NFL and then he decided it was time for him to go somewhere else,” Gingrich said. “I don’t know how often John wanted to be back pacing the field and worrying about winning and losing.”